This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Friday, September 18, 2009

The fallacy of tele-commuting, video conferencing and virtual meetings to reduce CO2

[A lot of equipment vendors are promoting video conferencing as a solution to reduce Co2 emissions, especially from air travel. But as this article shows there is not a lot of compelling evidence that video conferencing is that effective. At first blush it would seem that the savings from air travel would be significant. But most analysis of video conferencing fail to take in account that the video conference system is often left on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The cumulative power consumption and resultant CO2 emissions may outweigh the gains made in eliminating air travel. Video conferencing should be part of an overall portfolio of reducing CO2 emissions, but on its own it is as affective as putting caulking around windows to seal out the drafts when you have still got the front door wide open --BSA]

By now, you’ve probably heard the following claim: Video conferencing, when done right, can offer companies significant benefits when it comes to travel. By eliminating the need to send employees to on-site meetings, companies can cut both the cost and the nasty carbon emissions bill associated with such journeys.

That’s the message used to help market next-best-thing-to-real-life video conferencing services like Cisco’s TelePresence. collaboration service — that virtual meetings can save both money and the planet. But look beyond the headlines and the soundbites, and you’re likely to find a somewhat less verdant tale.

Digging into the data

Those may sound like some big numbers, but if you look at the actual research, not just the press releases and marketing tie-ins, they start to shrink. The study from Australia? It goes on to say that those 2.4 million metric tons of emissions are just 0.43 percent — less than half a percent — of the country’s total. (To be fair, GreenBiz also notes this fact.)

The impact of video conferencing in the BCG/Climate Group study was equally lukewarm, if not more so. Emissions reductions from “dematerialization,” the category under which teleworking and video conferencing fall, account for just 0.9 percent of the total potential emissions reduction in its scenario, while video conferencing on its own accounts for just 0.15 percent of the total potential.

What’s more, the actual travel-replacement effects of video conferencing aren’t exactly carved in stone. According to the WWF study, some research indicates that video conferencing may actually have a neutral or negative impact on employee travel, because travel time and budgets associated with internal meetings are shifted to strategic meetings with contacts outside the organization. That may be good for business, but it doesn’t do much for the polar ice caps.

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About Me

Bill St. Arnaud is a R&E Network and Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation research and education and Internet networks. He also works with clients to develop practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and dynamiccharging of eVehicles (See http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/) . View my complete profile